REVIEW: JANE COMMANE’S ‘ASSEMBLY LINES’

REVIEW: JANE COMMANE’S ‘ASSEMBLY LINES’

“Sexual
intercourse” declared Philp Larkin in his second-most-celebrated opening line
“began/ in nineteen sixty three”. Published four years later, at the height of
the Summer of Love (and three hundred years after John Dryden’s poem of the
same name), Larkin’s “between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the
Beatles’ first LP” heralds a vibrant Britain on the cusp of cultural revolution.
Fast forward to 2018, and decades of stagnation mean the kneejerk response to
fellow-Coventrian Jane Commane’s “between glasnost and things can
only get better” is a bitterly chuckled “Wanna bet?”

Assembly
Lines, Commane’s
subtle, complex début collection, explores the impact of growing up in an era
of decline, and the ambiguity of emotional attachment to its landscapes. To
vistas that are “nondescript”, “forgettable” and like “Morris, Austins and
Talbots, slightly crap, even when new”, she brings an appreciation more
traditionally applied to the natural world, together with a determination to
stay clear-eyed about what it really means.

This
is not a trivial endeavour. The line dividing emotional attachment from
nostalgia is already a thin one. The politicisation of nostalgia since the
Brexit vote has left the past as artistic source material ever more vulnerable
to misinterpretation. In ‘Our Old Lady of the Rain’, Commane confesses of a
derelict former factory “I loved her, though I didn’t know if I should”. What
is her reservation? Could it be guilt that love is not an appropriate response
to a place where futility seems to be the ultimate memorial to working lives
spent within its confines.

The
poems in Assembly Lines were written on either side of the EU
referendum, and there is a sense that the outcome blew Commane off course
somewhat. Not just because afterwards, the past became even more
heavily-contested terrain than it was before; but also because Commane herself
is clearly a remainer, while the post-industrial town of Rugby, the inspiration
for many of the poems, was, like many other so-called ‘left-behind’ areas,
enthusiastic for leave. Post-referendum, she faces the dilemma of how to love a
town but hate the way it voted.

The
most direct confrontation occurs in the five stanzas of ‘UnWeather’, the
Brexit-inspired poem that sits at the heart of the collection. In the searing,
shocking fourth stanza, Commane voices the pulsing rant (or are they the silent
thoughts?) of a xenophobic leaver who wants “to piss a stream of Rule Britannia
over their flowerbeds”.

But it
is Stanza II that is perhaps the most significant, with its repeated chant that
“we need a new word” for emotions such as “the sense of betrayal/that smashes
the pedestals of household gods”. Loudmouthed haters are easy: they deserve to
be taken down. Far more problematic are the rank-and-file, the leavers-next-door,
the people who feed your cat when you go on holiday. How do you talk about the
choice they made without deepening divisions?

For
answers, Commane turns to structural factors such as inequality, the
revisionist nature of the National Curriculum and the shallowness of the
service economy (“vast retail shacks/hitched up on borrowed cash”). She also
approaches obliquely, as in the heartbreaking nature poem ‘Disturbed’ or the
‘On the New Bypass’ where “the vanishing point of the bypass bisects and turns
in on itself”. Her fascination with maps suggests both connection to older
landscapes and present-day loss of direction. What is left curiously
under-examined is the alienation of feeling that the place that forged your
identity no longer identifies with you.

Assembly
Lines touches
on the inseparable entanglement of the Brexit vote with the sensitive areas of
time, place, memory and identity. But at a time when we desperately need to
look forwards, it also exposes the extent to which the difficulty of speaking
about Brexit, created in part by these issues, is impacting artistic
expression: how can we envision the future if we cannot articulate the
here-and-now? Jane Commane is right: we need new words.